The Disorient Express

His first-class ticket safely in hand, J. I. Baker was looking forward to a restorative train journey through Central Europe. It didn’t turn out that way

The First-Class car on the train from Vienna to Prague was a run-down rusted red caboose whose fly-spotted windows were erratically covered by torn dirty curtains. It didn’t look like first class to my traveling companion, Philip, or me, but the man on the platform assured us it was—“Except,” he said, “you need reservations.”

“We have reservations,” I said. “In first class.”

“But do you have assigned seats?”

“What?”

“You need assigned seats.”

I had anticipated a long, leisurely trip with perhaps a few bottles of Budvar and a nap, but when we boarded we learned that we were sharing the car with a huge American tour group. The group had reserved, en masse, patchwork blocks of assigned seats that took trouble to sort out, since not everyone could sit with spouses or friends—a fact that caused considerable consternation on the part of the tourists and palpable panic on the part of their guides.

Thanks to the confusion, the aisles were packed with mostly older men sporting fanny packs and women in blouses that looked like sparkling, multicolored sailcloths. But nothing could dampen the peculiarly American combination of cheerful chattiness and interest in minutiae expressed through such phrases as “You don’t say!” and “Isn’t that interesting.” For instance: An old woman, finally sitting, loudly announced, “Well, I have an outlet here! I could plug something in!”

“Isn’t that interesting,” someone else observed.

“Would you like me to plug something in?”

Before long—as I waited, standing—they did in fact plug something into the outlet. It could have been a hair dryer. (A French friend once rightly observed that “Americans just want to solve stuff,” which often means we find utility where it doesn’t truly exist.)

As Philip and I searched for seats, most of the tour group had already settled contentedly down, clutching books on Empress Sissi and little journals filled with tiny drawings and exhaustive lists of the castles and churches they had seen and the many meals they had enjoyed in Austria. They had dined at Zum Schwarzen Kameel. They had stayed at the Sacher. They had learned to say, “Wo ist die Toilette?”

We finally found seats among four Brazilian families. They too were arranged in an odd hopscotch fashion which meant that they had to shout over seats and move up and down the narrow aisles. Philip and I weren’t sitting together, but we were strangely satisfied—until some of the Americans tried to chat up the Brazilians:

“Do you speak English?” one asked.

“No.”

“Where you from?”

“Brazil.”

“That’s Spanish, isn’t it?”

Before long, they were sharing photos. “This is schinken and cassie,” said one, giving his translation of Schinken and Käse, or ham and cheese, as he raised his wife’s iPad in the air, like a boxing scorecard. “We had this on toast. My wife had the goulash, also.”

“Let me see that,” his wife said, taking back the iPad and scrolling through the pictures she had snapped of everything they had eaten. “Which one is this?” She pointed to an image of Wiener schnitzel, and the husband gamely tried to figure out where it might have been served. The problem was that there were at least six photos of Wiener schnitzel, and the husband couldn’t tell which one this was. He tried to match the tablecloth in the photo with the descriptions of the restaurants he had noted in his journal. “This looks like on about . . . Wednesday.”

“Wednesday was the horse show.”

“No,” he said. “That was the Sacher torte.”

As the train left the station, a woman started pushing a rusty cart down the aisle, selling Budvar and wrapped croissants, looking for all the world like the spawn of a Pan Am stewardess and a Trappist nun. I stared out the window at the landscape, which alternated between unspeakably beautiful hills and an industrial wasteland that would have terrified T. S. Eliot. The Americans (Philip among them) and the Brazilians all started ordering beer.

“Take it from me,” one man said. “The only churches you should go into are the ones that have cripples outside them.”

“You don’t say.”

“That’s what my wife and I figured out. It’s the system we sure figured out. You don’t go into a church that doesn’t have a cripple outside it.”

“You don’t say.”

“Works every time.”

It wasn’t long before everyone wanted more beer. “Waitress!” one man shouted, waving at the woman with the bad cart in the aisle.

“Do you have euros in Czechoslovakia?”

“Czech Republic,” she said.

Two hours into the trip, a man got on at Brno, glared down at me, and said something in Czech.

The woman selling beer translated: “He has your seat.”

“I think I have my seat.”

“No,” she said. “He has an assigned seat.”

She told me that I had to leave. I asked where I could sit. She said she didn’t know. I said, “If there are assigned seats, you must know which ones were assigned.”

She did not.

I pointed to a vacant seat two rows ahead of me: “Is this one occupied?”

“I don’t know.”

So I got up and moved all my stuff to the seemingly unoccupied seat. I sat once again by the window and stared at the blurring landscape. This lasted until, just past Břeclav, a woman in a burka who had been in the club car walked up to me and told me angrily that I was sitting in her seat. I got up, apologized, and moved to the seat ahead of her. She told me no: That was her seat too.

There were no seats left.

At this point, my primitive fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in, which is to say I fled, annoyed by the fact that the entire train was now staring at me with a combination of shock and pity. They were all whispering, comfortably clutching their iPads and Sissi books, their moist croissants and beers, wondering what I would do. I had become the main event. But I wanted no more attention. I just wanted the journey to end. So I did the only thing that I could think of: I went to the back of the train and stood, luggage around my ankles like leashed Lhasa apsos, by the toilet . . . which of course did not work.

This soon became a problem. First, two men arrived to use the toilet, which they called the toe-let. They each tried unsuccessfully to open the bathroom door; then, assuming it was broken, tried to pry it open together, narrating their adventure as it happened.

“Here we go,” one said. “We’re opening the door.”

“The door isn’t opening.”

“We’re trying to open it.”

When they succeeded—“Ooof!”—they exposed a nervous Japanese woman with her skirt pulled up and her panties around her ankles. Turns out the door wasn’t broken; it had simply been locked. The woman tried to shut the door again. The men backed away and stared, dumbfounded, at me.

“She shut the door,” one said.

“She’s locked it again.”

When the woman finally finished her ablutions, she opened the bathroom door and tried to explain to the three of us—with, by turns, broken English and elaborate, exaggerated hand gestures—that the toilet did not work.

The first man turned to me. “The toe-let doesn’t work,” he said.

But he forged ahead and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged and told me that there was no water. “It no work,” he said, thinking perhaps that my angry silence up to this point meant I did not speak English. He mimed a flushing motion that would have shamed Shields and Yarnell. “It no ess worken,” he said.

“Okay.”

Since this was the only toilet on the train, I realized that sooner or later I too would have to use it. I tried to hold it. I did everything I could to hold it. I managed to hold it until Česká Třebová. Then I went in and found, inside the toe-let bowl, an accumulation so huge that the cover wouldn’t close. I did what I had to do, but before I was finished I heard an angry pounding at the door.

“It doesn’t work!” I shouted.

A voice: “You can’t stay in there!”

I opened the door and saw a severe woman who had once surely run a women’s prison in some Russ Meyer movie. She seemed to be the manageress. “You can’t stay back here,” she said, having heard that I was standing near the toilet. “There are no seats here.”

“There are no seats anywhere. That’s the problem. Look, we paid for first class and now we can’t sit.”

“You will get a refund. But sit.”

“There is nowhere to sit.”

“You must sit.”

This was like a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Agatha “Orient-Express” Christie. Except Vladimir and Estragon could at least sit down. And I wanted to murder everybody.

The woman left in a huff, returning shortly with Philip, now flushed with beer and carrying his luggage. I grabbed my Lhasa apsos. The manageress led us to the second-class compartment, where the seats were covered with swaths of what looked like dried milk and a hairlike substance that was either the cushion stuffing or, you know, hair. It smelled like vodka vomit. A toothless old man was coughing, and two frightened women wore masks.

So we went to the club car, where we found not schinken and cassie on toast but, according to the menu, “Cheving Gum,” “Crispys,” and a wine called “Green Veltliner.” But here’s the rub—or one of many: To stay in the club car, you had to keep ordering. Philip kicked up a stink, saying that we had paid blah blah blah blah and blah blah blah. Once again I wanted no more attention, so I said, “Look, I have a great solution.”

“What?”

“Let’s just start drinking.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I’ve already started.”

So we had the Green Veltliner, and the drinking was, as always, fun—until, an hour outside Prague, Philip asked the manageress for the promised refund.

“Not for international travel,” she said.

“You said we could get a refund.”

“I said for travel. You are international. No refund for international.”

This wasn’t the sort of person you could threaten. This wasn’t Nordstrom. We weren’t returning a gently used overcoat. Even if Philip had resorted to something as extreme as fisticuffs, he would have been on the Joe Frazier side of the knockout. So he fell back on his considerable verbal skills: “You,” he said to the woman, “are a bad, bad person.”

This had about as much effect as laetrile. She laughed and turned the palms of her hands to the ceiling.

After she left, I looked at Philip and said, “Well, you showed her.”

“She was really upset by that. I can tell.”

“Phil, she laughed at you.”

“Because she was upset.”

“Now,” the waitress said, returning. “Your order.”

So we ordered again. By the time we rolled into Prague, we had drunk so much Green Veltliner that I don’t even remember getting to our hotel. But I do remember one distinct and overriding thought: It may be true that you get what you deserve, but—on the road or off—you don’t always get what you pay for.